JAXenters turkeys of the year (so far)

All this thankfulness getting a bit sickening? Our compendium of the 2013s biggest Java howlers should be the perfect antidote!

The Java platform and the rich ecosystem that has
grown up around it is a vibrant realm of creativity, community
dynamism, and experimentation. But hand in hand with all that,
you’re going to get a few chaos monkeys too. There
have been some testing times for Java in the past year – as well as
some moments of arch-ridiculousness from some of the corporate
bodies around it. Get ready to cringe as we relive some of the
biggest Java turkeys of 2013.

That Java EE 7 promo video

“Hey everyone, brainstorming time. Java EE 7 is coming
out soon. What’s the best way to communicate its
productivity-boosting features and HTML5 support to the development
community? I’m thinking a cliche-ridden
parody action film trailer. We can have a guy running around
looking like a cut-rate Jason Bourne. And then he can save a bunch
of bored-looking EE developers from… a CCTV camera or something.
Yeah, that would be cool. Oh, and let’s have them coding Java on
iPads, because everyone knows that they’re the future of computing.
Java runs on iPads, right?”

Boats at OpenWorld

This year’s Oracle OpenWorld, now a parent event to
JavaOne, will be forever remembered for Larry Ellison’s decision to
abandon to his own keynote in favor of racing boats. Perhaps to
Ellison, for whom this year’s OpenWorld was his sixteenth, being
present to win the prestigious America’s Cup was far more exciting.
The OpenWorld attendees who had paid thousands of dollars for their
tickets, however, were less than impressed when they realised he
was a no-show – storming out of the Larry-less keynote.

Applet security woes

By far the biggest turkey of the year was the
continued insecurity of Java applets. Despite being a legacy
feature of the platform, Oracle was forced to shift resources to
patching Java for desktop – contributing in part to Java 8’s
delays.

Many have called for Java’s browser plugin to be
abandoned altogether, but as demonstrated by the turkey below, this
is far from a realistic option. The only bright side to this whole
debacle is that Oracle appear to be taking the issue seriously at
last,
patching 51 vulnerabilities in the last update.

Firefox blocks Java

With Java continuing to be an achilles’ heel for
browser security, uber-advanced Mozillans must have thought
blocking Java by default to make perfect sense. You can do
everything with HTML5 and JavaScript now, right? So why expose
yourself to the security risks of running the plugin?

Unfortunately, there were two things the Firefox devs
failed to count on: the continued prevalence of Java applets, and
users’ inability to understand the frankly opaque UI for
re-enabling Java. Disgruntled users began to fill the related bug
report with angry comments.

“It affects all citizens of Denmark, as the national
login is blocked,” noted one. It didn’t take long for the block to
be reversed – for the time being.

The Ask Toolbar petition

This year, the community decided they’d finally had
enough of the obnoxious Ask Toolbar packaged with Java. This anger
and energy was harnessed by Java dev Saeid Nourian and chanelled
into…
a Change.org petition. Sadly, despite 17,744 signatures
(including Joshua Bloch), Oracle failed to remove the toolbar –
only conceding an option to leave the default search provider
unchanged.

Android’s lockdown

With Android now powering 80% of the world’s handsets,
it’s difficult to describe the mobile OS as anything but a success
– and a big part of that is its open source nature. There are some
worrying signs this year, though, that Google are
attempting to lock Android down. Much of Android 4.4’s core
apps (homescreen, calendar, hangouts, music, gallery, even the
camera) are proprietary Google versions, with their OSS equivalents
presumably left to rot. Plus, the leader of the Android Open Source
Project, Jean-Baptiste Quéru,
quit in August, publicly ranting about “sabotage” of his work.
Not a good sign.

The award for most embarassing / batshit crazy keynote
of the year must surely go to Qualcomm’s performance
at CES. Taking over from Microsoft’s regular slot, the hardware
manufacturer managed to squeeze in appearances from Steve Ballmer,
Maroon 5, Guillermo Del Toro, an actor from this year’s Star Trek
sequel, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Sesame Street’s Big Bird. What
we failed to learn from this glorious clusterfuck is, um, anything
about Qualcomm’s products.